This patent document relates to digital hardware designs.
Computational power of integrated circuits has increased dramatically over the past several decades due to improvements in integrated circuit designs and fabrication techniques, including shrinking transistor size and the corresponding increase in transistor count. In the past years, the frequency of a single processing core has slowed dramatically as power dissipation and the resulting heat generation has limited processor speed.
There has been great interest in increasing in processing power using parallel processing cores, which can provide more processing power per watt than can be achieved with a single processor solution. Yet, another prevalent trend in computing to increase processing power includes the specialization of processors. Early examples of specialized processors can include digital signal processors (DSPs), which has since proliferated to application domains including networking, wireless communication, audio and vision. These processors can typically be developed for embedded computing systems, which can have stringent constraints on performance. Achieving the desired requirements therefore can demand careful tuning of the underlying architecture that requires substantial amounts of time.